Prehistoric Shellfish Exploitation in Coastal New York

Abstract

Sectioning studies of marine bivalves are broadening our understanding of prehistoric shellfish exploitation along the Atlantic coast of North America. We review the evidence for the timing of shellfish exploitation in coastal New York and present the results of a recent sectioning study of Mercenaria mercenaria from the Sungic Midden site on Shelter Island, New York. The results compare favorably with the harvesting patterns of other north Atlantic Sites, indicating that shellfish exploitation took place during more than one season of the year. The implications of these findings are examined in relation to current subsistence-settlement models of coastal New York.     

The Changing Exploitation of Oysters (Ostrea edulis L. 1758) in Late Medieval and Early Modern England: A Case Study from Dudley Castle,West Midlands

ABSTRACT

Analysis of over 4000 complete left oyster valves from late medieval and post-medieval Dudley Castle reveals the changing role of this perishable luxury over a 700-year period. Throughout the occupation, it seems that oysters were used as ingredients rather than served raw in the shell. A greater reliance on oyster consumption is apparent in the later fourteenth century, perhaps reflecting a more diverse diet amongst the aristocracy in the wake of the Black Death. An increased preference for mussels and whelks is also attested in the Tudor and early modern periods, reflecting changing perceptions of these foods.

Overall, it is likely that natural beds were exploited throughout the time that oysters were being brought to Dudley Castle; however, the evidence demonstrates a shift from limited exploitation of natural inter-tidal sources in the eleventh century towards the dredging of sub-littoral beds in later periods, with some possible translocation of oyster stock. Changes in the shape, size and appearance of the oyster shells suggest the source locales from which the oysters derived changed through time. A notable shift occurred in the fourteenth century, which could reflect changes in supply brought about by altered tenancy at Dudley Castle and/or disruptions to trade brought about by the Black Death. Future biochemical analyses are recommended to provide greater clarity on the origin of those sources.     

Working the Waste Commodity Frontier: Metabolic Value and Informal Waste Work

Ambitions for a European “circular economy” imply waste is becoming an important “commodity frontier”. Increased recycling in Europe has been accompanied by a proliferation of informal waste work. “Southern” geographies of informal recyclers provide resources for interpreting this phenomenon but studies of a commodity frontier in urban waste have tended to focus on moments when informal waste workers are displaced by capital intensive waste management systems. I draw on concepts in world-ecology and materialist ecofeminism to explore the proliferation of informal waste workers in Barcelona and the way their (re)production produces “Metabolic Value”. Informal waste work is shown to emerge and persist as part of a commodity frontier process—where the appropriation of unpaid work from non-commodified spaces is the hallmark of how capitalism secures “Cheap Nature”. The study suggests that, rather than internalising ecological costs, recycling often rests on the appropriation of value from uncommodified spaces.     

Commercializing Nature: Mangrove Conservation and Female Oyster Collectors in The Gambia

Abstract: Taking a political ecology approach, this paper offers a critical evaluation of conservation efforts undertaken in Gambia's Tanbi Wetland National Park (TWNP), a “wetland of international importance” as designated by the Ramsar Convention. Focusing on the oyster commercialization component of the World Wildlife Fund's Gambia–Senegal Sustainable Fisheries Program (GSFP) in the TWNP mangrove forests, we identify oystering practices that promote mangrove conservation and others that conflict with sustainable management. The project, which aims to commercialize oyster culture through local women, is entirely production oriented, ignoring the ways in which oysters are prepared for market. As a result, degradation of the very mangrove forests the GSFP aims to conserve may be accelerated. The project selectively engages with local environmental knowledge and fails to consider the implications of expanding the value chains for oysters and their shells. Unless the World Wildlife Fund addresses these issues, its conservation objectives and potential socioeconomic benefits may be compromised.     

SOME HISTORICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE “DOWN EAST” ROUTE

For over three centuries, explorers and privateers, fishermen and planters, job seekers and tourists have plied the “Down East” route–bearing witness to the close connection between New England and Atlantic Canada. Today the traditional “good neighborliness” is threatened by a series of complex issues: American ownership of recreational land, environmental problems and jurisdictional disputes. This article seeks to place these present controversies in perspective by a historical overview of some key factors which have contributed to the interdependence of the two regions.     

CASINO GAMBLING AS A “GROWTH POLE” STRATEGY AND ITS EFFECT ON CRIME*

ABSTRACT Casinos are often considered as a “growth pole” strategy to revitalize dilapidated regions. However, voters often reject casinos due to their perceived adverse impact on crime. Using a quasi-experimental design we analyze the impact of the casinos on crime spillover from Atlantic City to other localities in the region. We found that the level of crime in localities adjacent to Atlantic City and along the major nontoll routes to Philadelphia and New York City up to approximately 30 miles from Atlantic City rose significantly following the introduction of casinos. Crime levels are higher than they would have been in the absence of casinos.     

Reconstruction of past backyard skating seasons in the Original Six NHL cities from citizen science data

This study conducted linear and change-point analyses of historical trends since 1942 in the length and number of days suitable for skating on backyard rinks in the “Original Six” National Hockey League cities of Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, New York, and Toronto. Analysis is based on the relationship between ambient air temperatures and the probability of skating, using thresholds identified through the RinkWatch citizen science project. In all cities, coefficient estimates suggest the number of high-probability skating days per winter is declining, with easternmost cities displaying notable declines and growing inter-annual variability in skating days in recent decades. Linear analysis shows a statistically significant decline in Toronto, with a step-change emerging in 1980, after which there is on average one-third fewer skating days compared with preceding decades. The outdoor skating season trends towards later start dates in Boston, Montreal, New York, and Toronto. Future monitoring of outdoor rinks provides an opportunity for engaging the public in identification of winter warming trends that might otherwise be imperceptible, and for raising awareness of the impacts of climate change.     

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'S RETURN

Kojin Karatani's Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani's case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani's accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world's history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx's own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation‐state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation‐states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani's appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation‐state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.     

Baudelaire's literary criticism

In the current debate on republicanism the relationship between republicanism and democracy is an aspect whose historical dimension has thus far hardly been investigated. It offers instead also the chance to clear up ambiguities on the opposition between republicanism and liberalism. In this sense, recent research on the radical Enlightenment, on the link between economics and politics, by a new reading of physiocracy as political discourse, and on the foundations of political representation represent some of the most important advances made by historical research over the last few years. This essay wishes to trace these results back to a long line of research on a modern republicanism that had already been investigated many decades ago by a historian of the Enlightenment interested in republican tradition, Franco Venturi, the author of Settecento riformatore and of Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, to which John Pocock dedicated the first volume of his recent Barbarism and Religion. By means of a successful integration of three recent essays by John Israel on the uniqueness of Dutch republican discourse, by Richard Whatmore on the economic roots of French republicanism and by Nadia Urbinati on the foundations of representative democracy in Condorcet, it is possible to isolate the characteristics of a democratic republicanism. Among the various threads that have been followed up, the theme of equality has surfaced in various ways in the search for the characteristics of modern republicanism. These highlight the idea of the emergence in the early modern age of an European political culture and of a democratic and egalitarian republicanism that was encouraged by the contribution from various national situations within which it forged its identity, against the model of an Atlantic republicanism.     

La Bataille,l'armee et la gloire (1745–1871)

This paper would like to contribute to the discussion on the formation of the idea of Europe and contextually shaping of the debate on the New World in early modern and modern history. Following an important Italian historiographic tradition, the paper discusses the eighteenth-century within a wider objective and subjective historical development.

The first part of the paper focuses on the Eurocentric realigning of the relations in the Atlantic world. It argues that this realignment remains basically a middle period phenomenon. The resistance by the Anglo and Hispano-American colonies to the “reforms” and the internationalisation of the crisis of American Empires actually caused a real caesura in the political history of the Atlantic.

The second part of the paper focuses on the impact of the Eurocentric reorganisation of European/American relations on collective consciousness, political ideologies and historical discourses on both sides of the Atlantic. It argues that this impact was much more lasting and profound.

The paper focuses finally on the anti-Eurocentrism matured in the Americas in the late eighteenth-century. It argues that this attitude declines to present the European cultural and ideological heritage, on the basis of an age-long American experience that historiography presents by now as multiethnic, multicultural and métisse. The paper suggests in particular that this American anti-Eurocentrism can be considered to some extent prototypical of a phenomenon destined to develop in nineteenth and twentieth century in the framework of the apogee, crisis and decline of Europe in the international world system and international world society.     

Refugees and racial capitalism: Meatpacking and the primitive accumulation of labor

When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but “legal,” refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees’ positioning as both “essential” sources of vulnerable labor and “prohibited” threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of “essential” meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor “prohibited” refugees to meatpacking work.     

Exploring Oyster (Crassostrea virginica) Habitat Collection via Oxygen Isotope Geochemistry and its Implications for Ritual and Mound Construction at Crystal River and Roberts Island,Florida

Research at Crystal River and Roberts Island Shell Mound Complex, on the western coast of Florida, USA, offers a quantitative assessment of the temporality of shell deposit construction, Native subsistence practices, and mobility patterns through stable oxygen isotope data from eastern oyster (C. virginica). The δ¹⁸O_water values of oysters vary synchronously with salinity, assuming relatively constant δ¹⁸O_water/salinity gradients since the time of occupation, allowing for an examination of shifts in oyster habitat exploitation over time. Our previous (Thompson et al. 2015) study indicated that midden accumulation occurred throughout the year, while oysters from mound deposits were collected in colder months. New data indicate that in addition to differential season of collection, habitat exploitation also varied. During early occupation at the site, oysters were collected primarily from lower saline habitats, while in later phases oysters were obtained from higher salinity waters; we relate this to a lower sea level and concomitant settlement shift seaward. Additionally, oyster from later mound contexts was collected from higher saline habitats relative to those in midden contexts; Native people may have targeted specific bioherms at certain times for the year for feasting-related mound construction.     

May Games and Noble Savages: The Native American in Early Celebrations of the Tammany Society

This paper discusses the May Day celebrations of the “Sons of Saint Tammany,” an American holiday fraternity under the patronage of an historical Lenape (Delaware) Indian chieftain, which incorporated many Native American performative elements. Beginning in Philadelphia in the colonial period and quickly becoming a vehicle for republican sentiments, the Tammany idea spread to many other east coast cities. The May Day revels of the Society reached their heyday in the early years of the new nation (Federalist period). Two trends in the use of Native materials are identified, the “vaudevillian” and the more serious ethnographic. The latter led to incidents of what can be called “carnivalesque diplomacy,” with native American delegations to the U.S. capital. Dr Samuel Mitchill's elaborate mythopoetic oration for the New York chapter in 1795 is taken as an end point for the creative appropriation of Native American elements. New York's Tammany Society would eventually evolve into the famous political machine of the Democratic Party, leaving behind the original May Day idyll and Indian masquerade.     

The Qing Dynasty Ministry of Justice Memorials and “The New History”

The Qing Dynasty Grand Secretariat Archives are considered to be among the four great ancient texts discovered in modern Chinese history, and the memorials from the Ministry of Justice have garnered particular attention due to their well-preserved socio-economic content(s). From the 20th century onwards the New History, with its emphasis on drawing upon the social sciences’ discussions of citizens, communities and society, came to replace the more traditional “Imperial Genealogy” style of historiography, affording us a grander view of history. Progressing forward with “the times,” the New History continued to innovate and diversify the field; in terms of Qing dynasty social historical research, it brought about constant exploration and change within the field, first having shifted from socio-economic history to social history, then moving on to life history, the investigation of the “seeds of capitalism,” class relations, lower-class society, marriage and family relations, law and justice, gender studies, daily life (“life, livelihood and environment”), and so on, continually pushing the boundaries of academic research. Yet, underlying all this change was a close relationship between the use of the Ministry of Justice Memorials and the field’s overall development. This article not only introduces several findings made by academicians in using the Ministry of Justice Memorials, but also sets out to further reveal the relationship between the New History and the memorials themselves, probing into the deeper question of broader changes in historiography and their relationship with generational shifts in intellectual thought.     

The intellectual origins of Leninism, 1977

This essay is a general introduction to the special number on recent research on Atlantic history. While the topics here presented are diverse, most focusing on the first French Empire, particularly in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authors share several common themes: (1) In Africa and the Americas, they seek to view the question of the Empire as a series of contested, temporary, and uncertain alliances and collaborations, in which negotiation rather than submission was most often the basis of power relations; (2) In the realm of political economy in theory and practice, the authors refuse pre-established notions of an Atlantic “community” of commodities and merchants functioning within an Atlantic “system.” Instead, they focus on closed networks of merchants functioning within the dynamics of merchant capitalism. (3) The authors seek alternatives to traditional approaches focusing on the nation-state and its institutions. Instead, they examine communities and regions in the Atlantic that include social elites, such as, merchants, the nobility, the gentry, and intellectuals, as well as neglected native peoples and forgotten spaces such as Africa.     

The “informer” and the political and organisational culture of the Irish republican movement: old and new interpretations

This article will analyse recent interpretations of the “informer” as a subject of political and historical significance for a balanced understanding of the trajectory of the Provisional Republican movement. It will do so in part through a discussion of some recent fiction and memoir-writing devoted to the figure of the informer. Specifically, this will involve an exploration of the recent fictional re-imagination of the real-life case of Denis Donaldson, by the French journalist Sorj Chalandon (Mon traître, 2007 and Retour à Killybegs, 2011) (These novels have been translated into English as My Traitor (2011) and Return to Killybegs (2013)). All subsequent references are to the English versions. In the first section, the article analyses the historical evolution of the phenomenon and recent revelations regarding the apparently widespread existence of informers in the movement during the Troubles. This section engages with the academic debate concerning the effects of these revelations upon the morale and internal political culture of the republican movement; it is argued here that the “Republican family” has been significantly affected by these disclosures in the “post-conflict” era, and that they have become an important element in the contestation between leadership supporters and “dissenters” within contemporary republicanism. The second section utilises old and new literary representations of “the informer”, particularly based around Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer and Chalandon’s work, to discuss continuities and changes in the image and perception of this phenomenon. It is argued that the interweaving of fiction with real-life and factual historical detail is a particularly appropriate means of interpreting the role and effects of the informer.     

Kant and the Two Principles of Publicity

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to argue that the principle of “publicity” constitutes a fundamental idea in Kant’s political thought. Publicity provides a central insight that binds together various strands of Kant’s political writings (on issues as diverse as the question of Enlightenment, the right of revolution, historical teleology, reflective judgment, cosmopolitan citizenship, democratic peace, and republican government), and moreover, it offers a much-needed cornerstone for a systematic exposition of his nonexistent political philosophy. Apart from some eminent examples, publicity has been a rather neglected topic in the ever-expanding literature on Kant’s political ideas. Revisiting this notion will make us more attentive to his evocation of the “spirit of republicanism” over and above the letter of the law, and might prompt us to reconsider Kant’s reputation as a classical representative of liberal political thought. Indeed, it should inspire us to situate Kant’s appeal for the “public use of reason” in the vicinity of the republican ideal of political liberty.     

The Second Time as Farce: Archaeological Reflections on the New New Deal

Many connections have been made between the Great Depression and the current crisis in neoliberal capitalism, and many solutions proposed by the Left hearken to FDR’s New Deal programs. While New Deal policies had real benefits, assuming that they were uniformly beneficial to all lower class individuals is shortsighted. This is clear from the vantage point of our research in the Finger Lakes National Forest. The New Deal’s Resettlement Administration purchased these farms when implementing land-planning policies to move farmers off “sub-marginal” land to save families “stranded on sub-marginal farms.” Our research demonstrates that governmental land-use programs saved some farms by sacrificing others. This case makes it clear that solving current crises need more than nostalgic yearning for a mythic past. Solutions must come from a thorough examination of the “real concrete” past, not simply the past as imagined.     

‘The Island Blazed’: A Blinding Light and Tiepolo's Hound

This essay is primarily a study of Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound as an affirmation of Caribbean, tropical, blinding light through an engagement with the life and work of Camille Pissarro. Conceived as such, the poem, I argue, proposes an “adamic” vision and imagination attuned with “Time” rather than “History” (the concepts are Walcott's), as well as an intensification of sensory-perception beyond vision. In order to better appreciate the historical and contextual relevance of Tiepolo's Hound, the essay provides first a general introduction to: (1) a nuanced understanding of light and its “otherness” emerging from modern physics; (2) some of the ways in which western capitalism and Cartesian perspectivism, as a hegemonic aesthetic and philosophical tradition in the West, have attempted to capture and control light and its “otherness;” and (3) the blinding quality of light in the tropical context, which repositions light as a force against any and all exploitative capitalist desires.